Heretofore, tags have been affixed to lumber by hand stapling tags to the lumber or utilizing pressure sensitive tags which are pressed onto the lumber. The Reitmeier patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,014,896 discloses a device which is designed to provide labels which are stapled onto the ends of lumber. A roll of labels are fed into the stapling machine. Portable staple machines are well known in the prior art and shown, for example, in the Heard patent U.S. Pat. No. 3,476,302. However, it is not possible to hand staple tags on lumber which are moving on a conveyor at the rate of one foot per second. In the case of 2.times.4 pieces of lumber, the end of each board has a length of 31/2 inches and with the boards moving along the conveyor at the rate of one foot per second, it would necessarily require that a tag would be applied to the boards within 335 milliseconds. This is, of course, an impossible rate to achieve manually. Thus, it became necessary to provide a totally automated method and apparatus for applying tags to lumber.